Lost in Criterion

This week a bask in Jules Dassin’s visual record of mid-century New York. Of course it has to come in one of his most pro-America, pro-police works. Not to worry, though, as next week we’ll have a very anti-police movie, and in three weeks we’ll have Dassin’s own ideological answer to this one in the anti-prison film Brute Force.

But this week’s it’s The Naked City, the story that launched a million stories in the form of the police procedural spin-off tv show, and every imitator down the line. Now today there are more fictional murders on New York-based crime dramas than there are actual murders in New York, so isn’t that something?